Why is nobody paying attention to this?

[fpb]

I had never even heard it, had any of you? And yet it is since 2007 that Germany had announced the establishment of a purely German space program, separate from the European space agency, and intended to go to the Moon. Now Peter Hintze, the German federal director of aerospace, has announced that Germany plans a mission to the Moon within ten years. One of the many ways in which the world media are corrupt is that they never pay any attention to news like this. There is a meme that Europe is lazy and declining, and that the future is in the Far East. Any news that contradict the meme simply are not publicized. And when German spacemen will in fact be walking on the Moon, everyone will be surprised, not knowing that the program had been widely announced.

(the news was reported by today's Italian Catholic newspaper L'Avvenire)

Comments

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"There is this concept, especially in America, that only America has the capability to travel to other worlds."

It was not always thus, not even in my lifetime. During the Space Race with the Russians, while the Americans were staring dumbfounded at triumphs like Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the Americans were not so sanguine or parochial.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sooner or later someone was going to do it. What annoys me is that even I expected China or Japan or even India to beat us there, and that in spite of the fact that according to L'Avvenirem Germany had clearly stated her goals as long as two years ago.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

What's funny about that is that Soyuz rockets and spacecraft seem to still be the most reliable and perhaps cheapest access to space, with Russians still doing the bulk of the world's launches.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is largely because once they had got to the Moon, the Americans completely discarded the Saturn 5 technology and started on a wholly different vehicle, the shuttle. The result was that the shuttle proved impractical and expensive, and the technology of Saturn 5 got no updates and may even have been partly lost as the people who worked on it die out or forget.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

We've also lost most of the tooling and plans for the Saturn 5. We would need to start from scratch at this point.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Not the plans.
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five_000313.html
Tooling, maybe. Then again, there are lots of ideas for improving the concept of a heavy launcher, so maybe not such a huge loss.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You lost thirty years of working at it, and it is in the working at it, not in starting something over again, that the real advances tend to be made.